Agriculture Reference
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sumed the dominant role? More to the point, why did policy makers largely ignore the pro-
vocative community-building findings reported by C. Wright Mills and Melville Ulmer and
Walter Goldschmidt in the 1940s and uncritically accept the underlying community-busting
tenets of the free-market/modernizaton paradigm?
Part of answer may have to do with the historical period in which Goldschmidt and Mills
and Ulmer published their findings. Both of these research projects were undertaken at a time
when big business had become the primary engine for military production during World War
II. Once established, the military industrial complex became a model for large-scale, corpor-
ate industrial organization throughout the economy, including agriculture and food produc-
tion. The consequences of an economy increasingly organized around large-scale economic
enterprises for workers and communities were unknown. Coming out of the Second Word
War, at least some members of Congress felt compelled to hold hearings on this subject. 47
While Goldschmidt's and Mills and Ulmer's studies affirmed the social and economic be-
nefits of small business and the family farm for community life, and the deleterious effects
of big business and big agribusiness, little, if anything, was done to stem the trend toward
economic concentration. Indeed, the decades after World War II were part of an era that the
economists Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison have called “Pax Americana.” 48
Accord-
ing to these authors
In the years following World War II, a host of public policies promoted and facilitated the centraliz-
ation and concentration of control over private capital. Especially in the form of tax breaks to busi-
ness, these political and legal “incentives” were often publicly justified as potential “job creation”
devices. But whatever the official rationale, the “de facto” outcome of government policy was to
promote and protect concentrated economic power … in the United States… . 49
One consequence of the concentration of economic power was that “… postwar economic
growth … promised to generate the material basis for … raising workers' standard of liv-
ing… . This wealth in turn made it possible for government to legitimate the new order …
by greatly expanding the 'social wage': that amalgam of benefits, worker protections, and
legal rights that acts to generally increase the social security of the working class.” 50 But as
Bluestone and Harrison and others 51 correctly noted, as global competition heightened and
corporate profits in the United States fell in the 1970s, “… the willingness of capital to hon-
or the social contract [with labor] and the ability of the U.S. economy to afford a large and
growing safety net would come to an end.” 52
Today we are in the middle of a rapid transformation of our agriculture and food systems.
Driven in large part by the imperatives of global capitalism, a handful of large multinational
agribusiness firms and food corporations are directly and indirectly shaping how and where
food is produced. The outcome of this transformation is likely to be an increasingly homo-
geneous, uniform, and standardized set of consumer products and a continued erosion of
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